Managing Linux® Systems with Webmin™ System Administration and Module Development

37.10. Reading Users' Email

As the introduction explains, Sendmail stores messages received by users in files in the /var/mail or /var/spool/mail directory. These are read and emptied by the POP3 server, command-line mail clients like pine or elm, or web-based mail clients like Usermin. This Webmin module, however, can also act as a simple mail client, allowing you—the system administrator—to read any user's email.

This feature is useful for deleting large messages in user mailboxes that would otherwise take a long time to download over a dialup POP3 connection. It also allows you to read email for system users such as root without needing to telnet in or run a separate mail client. More controversially, you can even invade people's privacy on ...